By Jim Kelly, Founder of Industolutions

Growing a B2B company – and securing new customers – isn’t easy.  Some of the biggest B2B marketing challenges include lead generation, lead quality, and new business development.

B2B marketing has experienced significant changes recently, due to evolving customer demands, as well as many new options of tactics, tools, channels, and technology at our fingertips.  The sheer volume of marketing options has become overwhelming and chaotic for many.  It’s time to evaluate what’s most effective and focus on the marketing efforts that will provide the “biggest bang.”

In surveys of B2B marketers, customer case studies – or success stories – are often rated as their most valuable piece of marketing collateral. They effectively communicate “proof” of successful best practices, viable solutions, and ROI around customer challenges. Ironically, though case studies are critical, they can be very difficult to find. 

If B2B marketers could do a better job spotlighting their case studies, they’d reach a far more robust group of potential customers – which would lead to increased sales.  Now, there’s a new solution: a curated aggregated online case study database.

The benefits of this new resource are numerous, including:

Help Customers and Prospects Find Your Case Studies

What good is a case study if customers and prospects can’t find it?

Vendors spend tremendous time, effort and money developing their case studies, which are considered highly validating resources.  And these success stories are valuable marketing tools, demonstrating how B2B vendors’ proven solutions can cure customers’ pain.  But case studies have historically been very difficult to find, which is extremely frustrating for both the vendors and the prospects that need them.

Customers are intimidated when trying to identify and vet B2B solution providers to address their company’s biggest challenges.  It takes a significant amount of time and energy to research potential vendors, and prospects don’t tend to “dig deep” into companies’ archives or resources pages to uncover their success stories and case studies.  Search engines like Google are overwhelming and ineffective for case study searches, with too much irrelevant information available.

What if there was a one-stop resource that aggregates, curates and makes searchable customer case studies across all industries, offerings, and challenges from B2B vendors?   Now there is.  This new database allows any professional from any industry to easily find the perfect proven solution to the challenges they face in their work. It saves prospective customers considerable time, money and hassle, allowing them to easily find the vendors and solutions they need.

Just as we spotlight volumes of photos on Instagram, videos on YouTube and PowerPoint slides on SlideShare, now there’s an innovative new database that offers access to thousands of B2B case studies, organized by industry, challenge, product, and service.

An aggregated, curated, online database of B2B case studies solves a variety of B2B marketing challenges, allowing solution providers to easily communicate their industry knowledge to prospective customers.  Additionally, it allows B2B companies to position themselves to a range of companies and industries as a proven Solution Provider, which is a highly effective marketing strategy.

Using this free database means that professionals from across all industries and professions can easily access the highest quality information – specifically solutions to their business and operating challenges – with no hassle or frustration.

Offer Cross-Industry Solutions

An additional value proposition of this online case study database means that professionals across every industry can easily find solutions to their pain points.  Interestingly, various industries can (and will) learn from each other.  Solutions for one industry can work for another, providing ultimate value across various silos. 

For instance, mining firms like Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton have found ideas and inspiration from rice sorters and car-assembly lines.  Some of the solutions that work well for rice milling and vehicle production are inspiring these mining firms to utilize similar technologies and machinery to solve challenges in their own industry.  While one may not immediately associate mining with rice sorting or car assembly, this example demonstrates how cross-industry knowledge sharing can result in innovative, effective (and sometimes surprising!) problem-solving.

Reach a Broader Range of Prospects

B2B marketers can use an online case study database to “cast a wider net” of potential customers.  This resource opens up your market and demonstrates that you offer solutions for a broader range of industries.  Using an online case study database, marketers can successfully reach new audiences for their solutions and grow their market share across new categories.  (Case in point: who would have imagined that mining companies would find solutions from rice sorting equipment?)

Use this database to show how your proven solutions can cross-pollinate and solve a wide array of challenges.  This means that vendors can significantly increase sales and expand to new industries and audiences they may not have considered before. 

Not surprisingly, this leads to more business for the vendors.

It’s a “why didn’t someone think of this before” idea.  This new online case study resource is the ultimate in knowledge sharing, with enormous benefits for vendors, customers, and marketers.

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Jim Kelly is the founder of Industolutions, the first and only an innovative, intuitive online platform that is dedicated to the aggregation, curation, and searchability of B2B case studies in a user-friendly format.   Industolutions allows B2B vendors to spotlight their case studies and solutions and allows prospective customers to find exactly what they need, searching by industry, challenge, product, or service.  Industolutions hosts 280k+ case studies from more than 17k+ vendors, covering 400+ industries and 600+ vendor offering types – and it grows daily.